Authorship of Retraction Notices: "If Names Are Not Rectified, Then Language Will Not Be in Accord with Truth."

Retraction notices appear regularly in many scholarly journals, especially top-tier journals of science and engineering. One disconcerting feature of this emergent genre is evasion of authorship, that is, the deliberate obscuring of who has authored a particular retraction notice. This communication illustrates and discusses problems of evaded authorship of retraction notices. To address these problems, it proposes that scholarly journals should require explicit authorship of retraction notices and the inclusion of core generic components such as the content to be retracted, the reason(s) for the retraction, the attribution of responsibility, and the expression of mortification.